From Spies to Actresses to Porn Stars: All the Presidents’ Mistresses

Those who’ve held the highest office in the U.S. have come from a number of different backgrounds and campaigned on myriad different issues over the centuries.

Behind closed doors, however, many shared a single scandalous trait—they cheated on their wives, both in and out office.

While some turned into legacy-defining scandals, like Bill Clinton, others remained largely a secret. Below is a list of eight presidents who (allegedly) cheated on their spouses.

Donald Trump

No president’s alleged affairs are as relevant today as those of Donald Trump, who is currently standing trial in New York City for allegedly committing business fraud while concealing a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. Prosecutors say that payment of $130,000, which Trump denies making, was to keep Daniels quiet about an affair they had together in 2006—when he was just a year into his marriage with the former supermodel Melania Trump. The ex-president denied the affair for years, but appeared to conceded that it happened in a Jan. 2023 post to Truth Social, where he wrote, “it happened a long time ago.” Trump has also been accused of sexual assault by 26 women, a number which includes E. Jean Carroll—the author who was awarded tens of millions in damages after Trump defamed her over the sexual assault allegations.

Warren Harding

Warren G. Harding was president just two years before his term was cut short by a fatal heart attack in 1923, but he has some of the White House’s most bizarre affair allegations. Among them was an alleged affair with his mistress, Nan Britton, 31 years his junior, who revealed in a tell-all book that he had a particular White House coat closet that he preferred to sneak off to with her. Britton also revealed that she’d secretly given birth to Harding’s daughter, Elizabeth Ann, who she suspected was conceived on a couch in his Senate office. DNA confirmed decades later that Ann was indeed Harding’s child. Harding was also known to pen racy letters to his lovers, which included Carrie Fulton Phillips. In those writings, Harding used the codename “Jerry” for his penis—a detail his family tried to keep under wraps for decades. This all took place while Harding was married to his wife, Florence Harding, from 1891 until his death.

Gerald R. Ford

Gerald R. Ford, who was president between 1974-77, was accused of having an affair with the East German spy Ellen Rometsch—the same woman linked to a separate affair with John F. Kennedy and others across Washington. Ford’s affair allegations were levied by a former Senate staffer Bobby Baker, who claimed in an interview with Politico that “Ford was having oral sex with Ellen Rometsch” while he was married to Betty Ford. Rometsch would later be deported to East Germany after she was outed as a spy who’d met with a number of top U.S. politicians in private.

George H. W. Bush

George H. W. Bush was married to his wife, Barbara Bush, from 1945 until his death in 2018—a relationship often lauded as being among the longest and strongest in Washington’s history. Those seven decades of companionship weren’t without rocky points, however, as Barbara revealed in a biography that she was suicidal in the 1970s when rumors spread of her husband’s alleged affair with his Congressional aide, Jennifer Fitzgerald. Much about the alleged affair has remained secret, but the biographer Randy Taraborrelli wrote in a Bush biography that it was a “long, 18-year affair.”

George W. Bush

George W. Bush was accused of sexual assault in 2002 by the Texas woman Margie Schoedinger, who alleged the then-president raped her two years prior. Coming on the heels of the Sept. 11 attacks and at the peak of Bush’s public approval rating, the lawsuit didn’t receive intense scrutiny by U.S. media and was ultimately buried. Schoedinger took her own life in 2003 before the lawsuit could play out in court, which allowed Bush’s lawyers to successfully motion to have the case dismissed. Another woman, Tammy Phillips, also claimed to have had an affair with Bush in the early 2000s, but she had no evidence to back it up and multiple media outlets, like Texas Monthly, deemed she wasn’t being truthful. Bush and his wife Laura have been married since 1977.

Bill Clinton

Perhaps the president most infamous in-office White House affair belongs to Bill Clinton, whose scandal with West Wing intern Monica Lewinsky engulfed U.S. political news in the late 1990s and was the central impetus behind his impeachment trial. Aside from Lewinsky, who Clinton conceded went down on him in the Oval Office, scores of other women have accused Clinton of sexual assault and rape. That includes alleged affairs and assaults involving Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Leslie Millwee, all of which allegedly occurred while he was married to Hillary Clinton, who he wed in 1975. Despite the allegations, Clinton survived his impeachment trial and never faced criminal charges.

John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy was known as a womanizer in Washington well before he set foot in the Oval Office in 1961, and rumors of affairs followed him into his presidency. Following his assassination in 1963, several women—ranging from college students to White House staffers—said publicly that they’d had affairs with Kennedy. Those rumors were addressed by his wife, Jacqueline “Jackie” Kennedy Onassis, on a number of occasions. That included her conceding that she knew her former husband would go skinny dipping with White House secretaries. For his 45th birthday, Kennedy was famously serenaded by Marilyn Monroe—sparking rumors that the era’s premier movie star and sex symbol had hit it off with the president. Those rumors never materialized into anything more than that, and those close to Monroe, including her biographer, Donald Spoto, said the two met only a handful of times.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Like his predecessor, Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson was said to have had a number of affairs both before and during his presidency that his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, was aware of. While president, Johnson was said to have had an affair with the White House staffer Helen Gahagan Douglas and with another unnamed woman, whom he even paid child support after she claimed a child was his, The Oklahoman reported in 1999. Citing an interview a reporter had with Lady Bird, the paper reported that Johnson “collected” women and “felt entitled to their services.” That article also referred to Johnson as a “sexual gorilla,” adding that his treatment of White House staffers would have been considered sexual harassment by the 1990s.